Reading List
some books I’ve read, are reading, and plan to read. Some entries are annotated with a bullet point summary
Last updated June 2024
reading
- Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
- H. Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
on pause
- U.K. Le Guin, The Disposessed
- J. Heller, Catch-22
- P. Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
- N. Juster and J. Feiffer, The Phantom Tollbooth (second read)
- K. Patterson et al., Crucial Conversations
future
- J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- P. Veyne et al, A History of Private Life, Volume I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
- C. Mann, 1493
past
2022
- N.N. Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
- Dark Souls philosophy in a book: you will die over and over again, then you will git gud
- N.N. Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
- If someone who stands to gain isn’t set up to take the L, stay away
- B. Mandelbrot and R.L. Hudson, The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of
Financial Turbulence
- Staring at charts: sometimes you can learn things from it
- S. Lem, The Cyberiad
- Making a new invention probably won’t make you any happier
- M.S. Sorenson, I Hear You
- People want their feelings validated
2021
- K. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance
with Death (nth read)
- Motto for life: so it goes
- N.N. Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in
the Markets
- Success is more down to luck than we want to believe
- N.N. Taleb, Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
- Don’t be the turkey
- T. Chiang, Exhalation: Stories
- There is repentance, there is atonement, and then there is forgiveness
- T. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
- Searching for meaning where there isn’t any still leads to fun outcomes
- T. Hodgkinson, An Idler’s Manual
- Doing nothing is a virtue
2019
- C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
- We’re always learning we don’t know anything
- J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed
- Be wary of non-local intervention based on legible information